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Tag: National Poetry Month

Each year the month of April is set aside as National Poetry Month, a time to celebrate poets and their craft. Of course, since this is Feminist Friday, I decided to explore women poets. There are very many accomplished women poets to celebrate but I want to talk about Sara Teasdale today. Sara won the first Columbia Poetry Prize in 1918 which later would be renamed the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Thus making Sara the first poet, male or female, to win this prize.

Like many women poets it seems that Sara did not live a happy life. Sara Teasdale’s poetry was very popular during her lifetime and she received public admiration for her well-crafted lyrical poetry which centered on a woman’s changing perspectives on beauty, love, and death. Many of Teasdale’s poems chart developments in her own life, from her experiences as a sheltered young woman in St. Louis, to those as a successful yet increasingly uneasy writer in New York City, to a depressed and disillusioned person who would commit suicide in 1933.

What follows is a poem from her Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Love Songs.

Barter

Life has loveliness to sell,All beautiful and splendid things,Blue waves whitened on a cliff,Soaring fire that sways and sings,And children’s faces looking upHolding wonder like a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell,Music like a curve of gold,Scent of pine trees in the rain,Eyes that love you, arms that hold,And for your spirit’s still delight,Holy thoughts that star the night.

Spend all you have for loveliness,Buy it and never count the cost;For one white singing hour of peaceCount many a year of strife well lost,And for a breath of ecstasyGive all you have been, or could be.

SARA TEASDALE YOU ROCK!

I invite you to share a story about an inspiring woman in the comments section. Just leave us a link to your post. We can never read too many stories about inspiring women. ￼

Child, child, love while you can The voice and the eyes and the soul of a man; Never fear though it break your heart — Out of the wound new joy will start; Only love proudly and gladly and well, Though love be heaven or love be hell.

Child, child, love while you may, For life is short as a happy day; Never fear the thing you feel — Only by love is life made real; Love, for the deadly sins are seven, Only through love will you enter heaven.